Mission controllers at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, clapped and hugged each other when the signal loss was confirmed.

Project manager Earl Maize said: “Congratulations to you all. This has been an incredible mission… you’re all an incredible team.”

Meanwhile, people from all walks of life – from astronomers and those part of the scientific community to space enthusiasts – paid tributes to the spacecraft that sent us close to 450,000 images, discovered six named moons and helped us publish close to 4,000 scientific papers.